All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (4 page)

Every so often, when I felt myself slipping into a neurasthenic funk, I’d walk to the Orange Street entrance ramp on I-90 and hitchhike to Seattle to visit my uncle, hoping a brush with danger would snap me back to reality. Nothing very interesting happened on those trips, except for the time I was aggressively solicited to proffer my cock so my driver could fondle it with his right hand while steering with his left. He claimed all he wanted was to touch my cock for awhile, then pull off the road and finish the job with his mouth. For this he’d drive me all the way to Seattle from the Idaho border. When I demurred, he stuck his thumb in his mouth and removed his dentures, allowing them to dangle in the space between us. He said, with real conviction,
It’ll be the best damn blow job you ever had
.

For a time I convinced myself that I’d given up on journalism. Life was too weird for journalism. I wanted to devote myself to art, to a bleak and eccentric vision along the lines of David Lynch. But the fact was I’d borrowed twenty-five grand to pay for an education in print journalism, so I had little choice but to pursue a career in print journalism, in order to pay off the twenty-five grand. Baking bread for six bucks an hour in Missoula, Montana, was not going to cut it, and there was nothing else I was any good at.

New York beckoned once more.

My first apartment in the city was a Hell’s Kitchen sublet arranged on my behalf by a friend. An actress owned the apartment; she’d gone to some backwater city in the American South to appear in a Shakespeare festival. I covered her co-op payments and looked after her cats while she was away. There were four of them. Three had come off the streets, and their ways had rubbed off on the fourth, so that all were now at least part feral. Perhaps they felt abandoned by their owner, perhaps they just didn’t like me, but they ceased to use their litter box, or rather they made the entire apartment their litter box. I chased them around with a broom, tried to frighten them into behaving, but that only provoked them to new outrages. I came home one night and found they’d torn apart my pillow, now just a cloudscape of synthetic stuffing floating across the bedroom floor. From then on I made my home away from home at McHale’s, a bar off the west edge of Times Square, four blocks from my apartment.

The hamburger at McHale’s was the best in the city, the bartenders—all of them female and all of them comely—poured spirits with a heavy hand, and the stools felt as if they’d been designed by ergonomic specialists devoted to the comfort of the human rump. Soft orange lamps burned dimly through the cigarette haze, and ceiling fans spun languidly in the sepia-toned light. I went there more than once in the daytime, but it was a bar built for the needs of the night. It was a hangout for off-duty cops and neighborhood residents and people who worked in the theater district, grips and lighting people and understudies and even the occasional name actor. It had the feel of a place that had been in the family for a very long time, as I later learned it had: half a century, to be precise. Ticket scalpers used it as a drop-off point, so there was a lot of traffic in and out, people leaning over the bar and offering their names, leaving with envelopes slipped in purses and pockets, a trade that gave the place a casually illicit flavor. I liked it in part because the help had a masterful sense for the balance of friendliness and discretion. The one thing they felt a need to know about you was your name. All the rest unfolded in conversation if you felt like talking. If you didn’t, that was fine too. No one there knew my story, which was just as well. Nobody could vouch for me, or badmouth me, as long as I avoided romantic entanglements with the regulars. For a while, avoiding romantic entanglements became my highest priority, next to finding a job.

I sent my résumé to two dozen magazines and a handful of newspapers. I was summoned for an interview just once, a courtesy I was granted because I knew someone who knew someone who worked at the magazine. It was called
Civilization
and was affiliated with the Library of Congress. A secretary guided me to the office of the editor, Nelson Aldrich, who asked me about my internships. I told him of the meticulous fact-checking I’d done at the
Nation
, the intrepid street-level reporting I’d done during my summer at the
Fargo Forum
, the many things I’d learned about the ways of the world while staring into the abyss of an impending deadline. I must have gone too far with the self-marketing, because Nelson Aldrich said I was overqualified. He was looking for an editorial assistant—a gofer, essentially. I told him I really wanted the job, wanted the chance to be part of an organ of substantive journalism, even if only as a gofer. He said I’d probably find the work boring and he didn’t want a bored assistant moping around the office. I told him it wasn’t my style to mope in the workplace. He told me the pay was poor and I could almost certainly find something better. I told him I’d already been looking for two months and didn’t share his optimism. We spent most of the interview in this way—me begging in an unseemly manner for the job, him trying to talk me out of wanting it.

After I left his office I never saw him again.

I may have had to leave the city a failure if I hadn’t called the head of the journalism department at the University of Montana. Before retreating to academia, Frank Allen had worked at the
Wall Street Journal
, so I figured he knew some people in New York who could lend me a hand. He’d been kind to me as a transfer student, helping me match classes I’d already taken with a new curriculum, and now he gave me the name of an editor at the
Journal
, told me I should call her and ask her to coffee. The thinking was that she might know someone who was willing to take a chance on a hungry young journalist from the northern plains.

Francine Schwadel oversaw the paper’s legal-affairs coverage. We met on the mezzanine level of the paper’s home building at 200 Liberty Street, just across West Street from the World Trade Center towers. Sitting at a tiny table with a faux-marble surface, a paper cup of coffee in her hand, Francine Schwadel said, in her gravelly Brooklyn accent, that Frank Allen had hired her when he was chief of the Philadelphia Bureau of the
Wall Street Journal
, and for that she was eternally grateful. There was no longer a Philadelphia Bureau of the
Wall Street Journal
, and about that she was sad.

She asked me a few questions about my experience, my goals, and then she said, Well, young man, my time is short, but your timing is awfully good. I’ve just been given clearance to hire a news assistant. Would you be interested in the job?

Yes, I said. Of course.

She told me to send her a résumé, cover letter, and six samples of my writing by the end of the week.

When I left the interview, which I hadn’t even known was going to be an interview—I thought she’d give me the names of some people she knew, and I’d have coffee with them too, and they’d give me the names of other people with whom I’d have coffee, and I’d follow the chain of connections until someone offered me a job—I was conflicted. All of a sudden I had a chance for a job at a paper that considered itself the world’s most important publication, but I didn’t want to work at the world’s most important publication. Journalism had appealed to me, in the beginning, because I’d been told by one of my professors that it was among the surest means of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. To an idealistic undergrad with socialist inclinations, that chestnut made journalism sound both noble and fun, but of all the places for a young man on the make to pursue a career in journalism, the
Wall Street Journal
seemed about the least compatible with a desire to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

I had a problem, though, and it wasn’t politics, which had begun to matter a lot less than the growing balance on my credit card. The legal-affairs editor wanted to see six samples of my writing, but I had only four, maybe five good ones from my days as an intern at North Dakota’s largest daily newspaper. I didn’t want to fall back on clips from my student newspaper days. The piece of which I was fondest was an essay I had written for the
Nation
about a proposed open-pit gold mine on the Blackfoot River in western Montana. In a throwaway line about a logging company whose clear-cuts of healthy forest had fouled the river with silt and killed untold numbers of fish, I’d written the following: “Even a newspaper as sympathetic to corporate plunder as the
Wall Street Journal
once called Plum Creek the ‘Darth Vader of the timber industry.’” I doubted the legal-affairs editor thought of her employer as sympathetic to corporate plunder. And I very much doubted she would hire me if she discovered I’d written such a thing.

I suppose I could have laughed it off as a youthful indiscretion with the English language if she asked but I didn’t want to take that chance. I had an acquaintance I trusted at the
Nation
and I called him, explained my situation, and asked if he’d do me a giant favor. Would he open the electronic archive of the magazine, touch up my article that said unkind things about the
Wall Street Journal
, and then print for me a copy of the doctored article, which would no longer say unkind things? At first he was reluctant. He didn’t want to tinker with the historic record of the magazine. I told him he should of course change back my wording before saving and closing the file.

Not exactly the sort of thing I’d been taught in J-school, but he complied.

Shortly afterward, I was hired.

I showed up for my first day of work wearing a starched white shirt and a sober red tie, wanting to make a good impression. The first order of business was to get my picture taken and affixed to a magnetic pass card. When waved in front of a beam of discerning red light, the pass card unlocked security doors in the paper’s austere corridors. Later I would learn that before the paper moved to the World Financial Center it did not have locked doors in its hallways, and one day a senior executive had returned from his lunch to find a sample of human feces on his desk chair. When the paper moved to its new headquarters, the executive insisted on the installation of locked doors that could only be unlocked with special pass cards. In theory a security measure, the pass cards also allowed the paper to track the movements of individual employees as they circulated through the hallways, thereby discouraging anyone who might have had a hankering to leave a malodorous turd on an executive’s desk chair.

As a news assistant, I mainly fetched faxes and replenished empty water coolers. I spent most of each day standing over a squadron of fax machines, collating and stapling press releases and court documents, then delivering them to reporters who covered corporate law, telecommunications, and the various health care industries. I performed this task with actuarial efficiency, the paper a blur in my hand like a magician’s trick; I served the reporters their faxes with the cordial discretion of a headwaiter in an uptown restaurant. The best means I had of telling good days from bad was by noting, at the end of my shift, whether or not I’d avoided a paper cut.

I’d spent my late teens and early twenties working dismal jobs—donut fryer, bartender, UPS package unloader—and borrowing heavily to pay for a college education that qualified me for a job that was already obsolete. People didn’t need to send faxes anymore. They could send email. I thought about mentioning this to Francine Schwadel. Could we not encourage people to send their documents electronically, thereby saving the world lots of paper and me lots of time? But then I wondered whether that would result, a little too efficiently, in my own obsolescence. So I kept my mouth shut, sorted and stapled the faxes, and every two weeks cashed my paycheck, which still came quaintly on paper, despite the advent of direct deposit.

One day my phone rang at work. It was my friend Mary, who’d put me in touch with the actress sublessor, she of the feline-occupied apartment. Mary was feeling a little chagrined about the cats and wanted to make things right. She said she had a lead on another apartment. A friend of hers was moving to New York from Detroit. The friend from Detroit had recently visited the city and, while staying with people she knew in Brooklyn, was shown a lovely old brownstone apartment. The landlord, being bisexual and living on the premises, sought tenants who were gay, bisexual, or gay-friendly. The woman from Detroit happened to be a lesbian; being a homo-friendly straight guy, I was deemed a suitable candidate to be her roommate, at least by Mary’s reckoning.

Mary was a writer, young and fledgling but with obvious talent. We’d met at the
Nation
and talked in an easy way from the moment I showed interest in her work. She had introduced me to the poetry of Theodore Roethke, a good thing to have in a dark time. I sensed early on that Mary wanted to be more than friends. She only made this clearer as time passed, and with each manic flutter of her eyelids I wondered: What could be so wrong with her that she found
me
attractive? I didn’t want to be Mary’s boyfriend. I wanted to be Mary’s friend. She’d been kind to me when no one else had; she was among the few people who’d taken an interest in me in that lonely city.

On my computer at work I could enter any street address in America and retrieve census tract data in a couple of clicks—one of the many slick tools available to editorial employees of the
Journal
. I typed the number and the street name I’d been given, and onto my screen came a statistical snapshot of the neighborhood. A median family income barely half the national average. More than a third of residents with incomes below the poverty line. A population quantified like this:

American Indian—0

Asian—0

Black—4,294

Hispanic—162

White—13

At first I thought there’d been a misprint. Thirteen of my hue in a sample of almost 4,500? A minority population of 99.71 percent? The numbers didn’t seem plausible. Then again, almost everywhere I’d ever lived—Iowa, Minnesota, Montana—the ratio of white to black had been reversed. If I was as broad-minded as I thought I was, what did I care if I was in the minority for once?